And Finally: Ready for some Olympic golf?

“What is important is that we’ll have good conditions for the athletes where the competition is taking place”, Bach said in Rio de Janeiro, where he is marking the 12-month countdown to the world’s biggest sporting event.

The British Olympic Association will send a team of about 350 athletes to Rio to compete in all 28 sports on the Olympic program apart from football, handball and basketball.

Following AP’s study, the World Health Organization advised the worldwide Olympic Committee to analyze viral levels in Rio waters. A development consortium, including the landowner Carvalho Hosken, will sell off the athletes’ villages after next August and get the rights to build on 40% of the Olympic Park site – but Paes said this was justified because in return they had paid 75% of the costs of stadium construction.

Paes and Carlos Nuzman, an worldwide Olympic Committee member who heads the local organizing committee, gave a presentation on progress at the Olympic venues.

Authorities here promised that a cleanup of Rio’s human sewage-strewn waterways would be one of the games’ most enduring legacies, but have since acknowledged that the Olympic targets were out of reach.

“Brazil isn’t all about lack of planning, overpricing and with no commitment to dates and times”, Mayor Eduardo Paes told Reuters.

But the generally positive picture darkens in what environmentalists and Rio residents describe as the horrific pollution in Guanabara Bay, where sailing and windsurfing contests will take place. We’re really enjoying the in-venue preparation time for this Games.

“We want to show the other side”, he said, joking that tropical Rio might even feel ready to “bid for the Winter Games”.

He admitted Rio had broken its promise to clean the city’s water in time for the Olympics.

NBC will launch promotional advertisements for the Summer Olympics beginning Wednesday across its networks, a move to generate excitement among viewers one-year in advance of the event. The ceremony went ahead will full-blown optimism, however, and Bach said that each of the organising bodies was powering ahead full steam.

The event’s top attraction, IOC President Thomas Bach, was a no-show, apparently because he was exhausted from his plane journey to Brazil that lasted about 30 hours – although he was due to meet later with Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff.